I really liked the classic SETI - simple, gratifying and it just worked.

I moved, got distracted and just finally got back around to this. I looked up SETI@Home and found BOINC. OK, download went OK, but everything after that was convoluted, complicated and didn't appear to work right. Defaults were very demanding - like I really want this running 100% of both my CPUs 'while' I'm trying to use my PC - NO. Event after turning the prefs down, both my CPUs were maxed. Quick deinstall and catcha in a year.

Looks like this was designed by a committee. Really, if you want users, make it quick, simple and - oh - make it work.

Perhaps, BOINC could have been more simple - for those running single machine and single project.

Frankly - I think learning 30+ one-[urpose only projects is way more complicated than learing BOINC once and use dozens projects under BOINC.
And when we comes to running several projects on a single computer, running several computer - doing so by one-purpose projects would become a nightmare...

"It's bad, make it good" is useless. Say specifically what you see wrong and how you want it changed. For example, I can't really help in making the interface simpler to use, because I got so used to the way it works now.

Using 100% of the CPU is not bad (except for overheating). BOINC sets all project applications to low priority (high 'nice' on Linux) so your other programs don't get slowed down. After changing settings, you have to let BOINC contact the project server to get the new settings.

i run my settings at 100% and i STILL play games and what not WHILE boinc is running. no offense but in this case it sounds like more of a problem with your computer than a problem with boinc

In fact, he didn't say he noticed slowdowns. He was just complaining that it uses 100%.

BTW, didn't SETI Classic use 100%??

yes, it ran at 100%, it also was somewhat multithreaded, in that a second thread could run some of the itme (the graphics?)

Then I surely don't understand btutor's complaint about it using 100% CPU.

I recently brought a new MacBook Intel Core Duo online and started running Rosetta and Einstein. It showed tasks running on both processors and the Activity Monitor showed 98+% for each. The cooling fan was screaming all the time. I went into preferences, set up "School" preferences, chose "Use at most 1 processor" and "Use maximum of 80%" and set that computer host venue to "School." Voila', after an update, problem was solved and fan normally is now off. It still seems to use 98% of the one processor, but the heat production is way down.

"Using X percent of processor" is only supported on versions 5.5 or later, but it was quite buggy until some 5.7.x version (don't remember exactly when it was fixed). If you really need that feature, get 5.8.0.

you et the latest build of BOINC from here:

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/?C=M;O=D

though be worned that this is a development version and not a production release. Having said that, I have not read or experenced any problems with the 5.8.0 version.

btutor and most of the other users who dislike BOINC do only see the 100%. But BOINC doesn't use a fix amount of resources! BOINC uses not 100%, not 50%, not 33%, it uses the free CPU-capacity.
An example: All processes uses 40%. BOINC now uses the 60% which are free, to reach the 100%. If you start another application now, which uses 20%, BOINC will only use 40%.
Running BOINC without "Using X percent of processor" you'll always have 100%, but it's not BOINC, but all processes together!

btw: BOINC is a lot better than SETI@home Classic, the only missing feature is running it on a host without internet connetion.

edit: I hope this post is simple enough...

you can run BOINC w/o internet. All you do is install BOINC on a comp w/ internet, and get your WUs. Then shut down BOINC and copy the folder to a USB drive, tansfer it to another comp, copy the folder to the HD, and open the boincmgr file. Then you let it run and when its done, copy the folder back to the USB drive, and back to the origonal computer that has internet.

Have you tried it? I think this might work, but if you're crunching on the computer with connection as well, you'll be in trouble.

What if they don't have the same amount of RAM? Server usually refuses to send work that won't fit on hosts' RAM, but if you crunch them somewhere else, be ready for big swapping.

Yeah, several crunchers reported good results with running CPDN off-line for many days. Some even tryed to crunch whole CPDN model off-line for weeks and upload&reported success.

Proxy servers (why BOINC doesn't have them).

I haven’t tried it with projects that give out different WUs based on RAM, like BURP. But from my experience, unless there is a check when the exe is acually ran, it will run whatever is in there. most projects work just fine, like SETI, chess, primgrid, WCG (if there is more than 384MB ram on both comps), and several others that I cant think of right off. For our intra-team race in SETI, there are some people who are using a sneakernets at work to run it on comps that do not have internet access. The most he had to do was to rerun the benchmarks to pick up the new # of CPUs.